Jeremy Bentham

Reading Latin at Three

Jeremy Bentham was born in London in 1748, was reading Latin at three and at Oxford at twelve, and spent a long life trying to put law on a measurable footing. His principle fits in a line: the right act is the one producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number — and he meant to actually compute it, weighing intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, and how many people. He called natural rights nonsense upon stilts. What came out of the arithmetic took the world a century to catch up with: prison reform, free education, votes for women, the separation of church and state, animal welfare, the decriminalizing of debt. Around 1785 he wrote a careful argument that sex between men should not be a crime, because no one is harmed by it. He did not publish it. It reached print in 1931.

He Left Instructions for His Own Body

He died on 6 June 1832 and left instructions. His body was to be publicly dissected for the benefit of medicine — at a time when dissection was a punishment reserved for executed criminals — and then preserved, dressed, and seated upright as an Auto-Icon. It is still in its case at University College London. The preservation of the head failed, so the figure wears a wax one. It is exactly what he argued: a corpse should be useful.